Kono Tenohira
by kaliawai512
Summary: His face revealed nothing, as always, but he gripped her hand like he was hanging over the edge of a cliff, and she knew she couldn't let him go. As she starts university, Orihime finds her first relationship is nothing like she pictured it. UlquiHime.


**In honor of Valentine's Day, I am writing romance. … and if you happen to know my writing from other fandoms, you know how incredibly strange this statement is. I don't really **_**do **_**romance… or at least I don't focus on it. Especially if the pairing isn't stated to be absolutely totally canon. So this is really, really incredibly unusual for me. But hey, while I don't consider myself a "shipper" of anything, I do find these two adorable, and the interactions between them were some of the most fascinating I read in Bleach. So just this once, I am permitting myself to write a flat-out pairing fic. I did my best to keep it in-character regardless, so I very much hope it worked. And despite this being in honor of Valentine's Day, the day doesn't appear in the fic. I was going to add it in, but the story was already darn long without it.  
**

**This little (well, maybe not so little) oneshot covers an AU future scenario of Ulquiorra being brought back after the characters graduate high school. There are spoilers to the end of the Arrancar arc, as well as vague references to the basic idea of the current Bleach storyline, but no real spoilers for that. No warnings, except for, well, Ulquihime (and it's pretty darn mild for romance, though the fluff might just choke you). If you'd like to see other pairings, you are free to do so, but it's intended to be left open for interpretation, so if you don't want to see them, they're not there. ;) Reference to canon character death. I also do **_**not **_**mean this to be anti-Ichihime—but Orihime's crush on Ichigo is canon, and I'm not just going to pretend it never existed, so dealing with her feelings for him is rather necessary.**

**Oh, and culture note: in Japan, saying "I love you" is **_**extremely **_**rare. It's not the sort of thing you hear spoken nearly as casually as in America. Even among couples, the word "like" is usually used (for instance, when Orihime was confessing to an unconscious Ichigo, she said "suki ni naru," often translated as "fall in love," but which more literally means "come to like"—the implication is romantic, though). Even when Orihime said "I love you" to Sora as a Hollow, the literal meaning was "I like you very much"/aka "daisuki." The direct verb for "love" is "aishiteiru," which is used very sparsely (the one case I know of in Bleach is Gin indirectly saying it in his Vol. 47 poem). Even among couples who have been married quite a while, it's not too uncommon that they've never exchanged those words.**

**I hope you all enjoy! Beware the tooth-rotting fluff. XD If you enjoy listening to music while you read, I wrote most of this while listening to "So Long" from the Toy Story 3 soundtrack, and I recommend it.**

_**Kono Tenohira**_

"Woman, what is love?"

She jerked her head up so fast her vision spun, and her eyes, long adjusted to reading the small print of the book in front of her, blinked several times to focus on Ulquiorra-kun a meter away on the other side of the library table. His face looked as blank as it always did, his mouth straight and eyes boring holes into her anew.

Then the question replayed in her head. She blinked again.

"… huh?"

"Love," he repeated, like he was testing the name of an exotic bird. "This concept has been raised many times in the 'romance' novels you insist I read. What is it?"

Orihime opened her mouth, clamped it shut, and cleared her throat.

"… wow," she murmured. She lowered her eyes and tapped her fingers on the wood. "That's … a big question."

When she looked back up, Ulquiorra-kun tilted his head so slightly she could hardly make it out.

"You were always eager to talk about the heart. Is love so much more difficult to explain?"

She bit the inside of her lip and shifted it between her teeth. She shrugged with twisted lips and furrowed brow. "Well … I don't know. I guess people don't talk about it that much."

"Then it doesn't have a meaning?"

She hummed and shook her head.

"It does … it's just hard to put your finger on, you know?" she tried with a smile as uncertain as her shrug.

He did not look away. His book lay forgotten in front of him, and for a moment she thought to remind him of it. Then she let go of her lip and huffed a noisy, contemplative sigh.

"Well, there are a lot of different kinds of love. Like … love between family members. Or friends. Or couples." She lifted her brow, and he offered no response, not so much as a sign that he understood. She glanced around at the occupants of the tables around them, some of them elderly, some high school students like she had been not long ago, all mixed in together like a pot of her newest culinary creation. Her shoulders lowered. "But I guess … it's all the same love, really. It's a little different, but it's all love. It means you feel more for that person than you could ever describe. You want to be with them as much as you can, and you never want to see them hurt. You care about them, and you want to help them be happy, even if it sometimes means you aren't happy yourself. And you do things you wouldn't normally do, just to see them smile."

She looked to him in full, waiting, but he just looked back in silent thought. With his deep stare, she couldn't decide whether he looked more like his old self or someone entirely different. The line had blurred more quickly than she thought it could, and now it was hard to remember where one ended and the other began.

Even after a month and a half, she still found that he looked strange in regular clothes, without his uniform or his mask covering half of his head, though the tear marks still trailed down his cheeks, his nails stayed black, and his skin remained as pale as bone—there were some things Urahara-san's gigais did not change, or perhaps some things Ulquiorra-kun preferred to keep. He had better fashion sense than she might have expected for someone who had only ever worn one outfit. Initially he had just worn the plain shirt and dark pants Urahara-san lent him, but as soon as he had the money to go shopping, those were replaced with fitted long-sleeved shirts, and others with collars and buttons, as well as several thin jackets. He tried on some loose pants at the store, but soon replaced them with several pairs of tighter jeans, most of them black. He never wore tennis shoes or sandals, as much as she tried to explain their practicality, and donned dress shoes even if they had several kilometers to walk. By some miracle, he never got blisters, and she couldn't help but envy that immunity.

Now she stared at him across the table, his arms folded near his open book, wearing the "Pride" shirt Kurosaki-kun had bought him as a welcome-to-the-human-world slash hope-we-can-be-friends-even-though-we-killed-each-other gift, with his favorite pale jacket even though it was warm out today, and she could almost tell herself he was just another human.

Almost. But he would never let her believe that for long.

For what seemed like a full minute, he remained still, his face displaying only the most minuscule of movements. At last he tilted his head a centimeter to the right, as if reaching a conclusion, although by the slight crease between his brows, she guessed it was did not satisfy him.

"It sounds like a very inconvenient emotion," he mused. His voice held the same discontent as his brow.

She threw her hands up in front of her and shook her head so fast her lengthened bangs almost flew into her eyes.

"No, no!" she insisted. Several people at nearby tables jerked their heads at the noise, and she blushed, ducked her head, and cleared her throat. She lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. "Well … I guess it hurts sometimes. It can hurt a lot. You can be worried more than you'd like, and you don't always know if the person you love loves you, too. But it's worth it."

She pressed a smile onto her face, forced at first, then real, and she wondered yet again if he could tell the difference. Her face held no question, though, no uncertainty, as definite as when she had spoken of the heart so long ago in the Fifth Tower, a world away from here. For a moment, she truly could not tell the difference between then and now.

She waited, but he said nothing else, and his words thudded like a heartbeat in her head until long after they had gone back home.

* * *

She didn't know when it happened.

Time had grown fuzzy since she was fifteen. A mere two weeks in Soul Society felt like months, the month she spent training with Kuchiki-san felt like days, the two days she spent in Las Noches were like years, and the seventeen months after Kurosaki-kun lost his powers and they lived in hesitant peace … she couldn't have placed a time on that. The emotional rush of it all clouded her memory, so that sometimes she forgot how old she had become, and when it finally came time to graduate high school and move on to university, she felt as if she had only just stepped through the doors of Karakura High, and the past three years had been a long, heavy blink, filled with flickers of colors and white, hope and pain, gain and loss.

So she didn't know when her feelings for Kurosaki-kun began to change, just like she had never been able to pinpoint when her silly crush on him turned into love. He had been special to her from the beginning, like she had somehow known, from the beginning, how important he would be in all their lives. She understood him in ways few did, but in other ways she remained blind. She screamed and waved and strived for his attention, but she could never truly reach him. When he looked at her, he saw a friend. A good friend, a precious friend, one to be protected.

A girl who needed his help, like so many others.

Not as a fellow warrior, one who could fight her own battles and protect him in return.

Time and time again, she tried to change that. She tried to make herself strong. She tried to make him see what she could do. But regardless, she was always a friend to be saved. No matter how strong she became, she would always be the same in his eyes. He noticed her. He cared for her. But he didn't see her. He didn't see what she wanted him to see. Perhaps, on some level, she had come to realize that that would never change. The realization was slow, so she couldn't pin it down any more than the rest of the changes within her, until one day she looked in the mirror and broke down in tears for no reason at all, and when she returned to school the next morning, Kurosaki-kun looked just a little different in her eyes.

But if she had to pick an instant when it had begun, she would have picked the moment she found the fragment of horn, lying in the sands of Hueco Mundo near the ruins of Las Noches.

She hadn't been looking for it. She had barely been close enough when the battle took place to know that it would be there. But when he had reappeared, leaping out of nowhere to detonate the burning red Cero, most of his left horn was missing. Sliced off by the black Zanpakuto as it slashed down from his shoulder to his hip.

She didn't know how it had gotten there. At first, she thought it was just a dead branch, or a piece of bone.

But bones did not come to a point, did not have that particular curve, did not look so familiar that the sight of them jabbed her like a sword to the gut.

She didn't mention it to Sado-kun. They had other things to deal with, things that would not wait for her to sort out her thoughts. She tucked her discovery away under her cloak, and as soon as she next stepped back into her apartment, she slipped it into the back of a drawer, behind some of her clothes, and almost forgot it was there. It hovered in the back of her head like a glimmer, so dim and far away she could barely make it out, or a familiar scent she couldn't name. Regardless, she had become far more logical. She knew she was needed elsewhere. This was something she could postpone.

It was only after the war was over, on a quiet Saturday evening after her graduation, that she dug it out and laid it on the center of her floor. Then she knelt beside it, her heart pounding so hard in her chest she thought it might burst, or her head would rush too fast and she would simply black out. Nonetheless, she held out her hands, murmured the familiar kotodama under her breath, and watched as Shun'o and Ayame stretched out a golden shield over the fragment of white.

In hindsight, she wasn't entirely sure what she expected. Recent events had made her braver, more likely to act rather than plan, for she knew now that if she waited, she would be too late. She lived in the pure unbridled emotion of each second she stared at the bone—the _horn_—underneath the shield, so much that she had no idea how long she had waited when it at last began to grow. When the horn seemed to grow a head, a scalp covered in black hair, and another horn, and a face, and the shape of a body sketched out before it grew in full. The shield expanded bit by bit to accommodate not just the horn but the full being beneath it. Once the wings sprouted, the shield took up nearly her entire living room, even while they furled close to the back. Dark fur covered the arms and the legs, the pale flesh, the gaping hole below his neck.

Then the eyelids, closed over eyes which had long imprinted themselves in the depths of her mind, two-toned lips and thick black tears streaming down his cheeks.

It was only a second after her shield vanished, her heart so loud now she could hear it in her ears, that the release faded. The tail and the wings dissolved into air, the fur to white hakama and torn jacket, and the horns to a thick white mask covering half of the shortened black hair, the sealed sword lying just alongside the white hand of its sleeping owner.

The reality of it hit her as a blow to the chest, and for nearly half a minute, she forgot how to breathe.

She sorted her racing thoughts only minutes before he opened his eyes, after several hours spent unconscious on the floor, chest raising up and down with the quiet breaths that reminded her he was alive. Her fingers trembled, sweat dripped down her cheeks, her legs tucked so tight underneath her that she had long felt them go numb. But nothing mattered as she watched his eyelids flutter, then blink like he was lifting rocks. Then they worked their way open at last, and she saw the shocking green which had colored her life years ago.

If she had ever tried before—and she rarely had, it hurt to think of it and it was so much easier to forget—she had never come up with a good idea of how he might react to being brought back from death. She might have imagined how a normal person would react, gaping and gawking and scrambling for bearings in the new and strange life he found himself in. She might have imagined anger for daring to bring him back after his defeat, or stares of confusion, or even attacks. She might have imagined—if she was tired and forgot his very nature—his lips turning up, throwing his arms around her neck in a grateful hug.

But this was Ulquiorra-kun. Ulquiorra Cifer, the stoic Espada who could kill without a blink, threaten without a hitch in his voice, and speak to her with nothing but his eyes. He was not like anyone else.

And so she should have expected he wouldn't react like them.

He stared up at the ceiling with eyes as wide as she had ever seen for all of three seconds. It was shock, yes, but it was momentary. His lips parted only long enough for her to tell that it had happened. Then those green orbs shifted to the side, toward the only other source of reiatsu in the room. Toward the girl kneeling on the floor just a meter to his left.

His eyebrows lifted and lowered, and he stared back at her in a silence that spoke far more than words ever could.

After a minute, his lips parted again, and his eyelids drooped, as if the past two and a half years had done nothing to cure his depleted reiatsu, and he was still as weak as the scorched being on the roof, missing two limbs and panting for breath.

"You changed your hair, woman," he whispered, voice so hoarse she could barely make it out. Her heart caught in her throat and choked any words she might have managed. He shifted his head on the floor below. "It does not suit you."

She wanted to laugh and cry and scream, but she could not make her lips move. The tears, however, came all by themselves, and they streamed down her cheeks even as she got him settled on the couch with a pillow below his head and explained as much as she could make sense of with her mind such a mess. Somehow, she sensed no explanation made a difference to him. He was there, alive, with her. That was all that mattered.

His eyes stayed locked on her face until she turned off the lights at sunrise, and he finally let his own close along with hers. He slept well into the afternoon.

It had taken only days to get things worked out with Soul Society, to receive their assurance that as long as he stayed in contact with someone approved to supervise him, as long as he stayed in a gigai, as long as he showed no sign of threat, he would not be pursued. Orihime suspected that the relatively positive interactions with Harribel-san and Grimmjow and the other Arrancars had helped their views toward Hollows, even ones who hadn't been there to help during the last war. At any rate, the result had been the same. He was free to leave for Hueco Mundo and join the Arrancars at any time, but whether he was there or in the human world, they considered him a tentative ally. They had even been generous enough to give him enough money to rent out his own apartment and pay for basic, modest living costs—Orihime suspected Rangiku-san had put in some good words to that effect. For what he couldn't afford, Orihime helped him out, and most of the time, he spent his days with her anyway. He ate meals with her, followed her to the store, and hovered nearby anytime she went out with her friends.

His old connections lost and burned, she was the only link he had to anything in this world. He had none of his own aspirations, no jobs he wanted to pursue nor life he wanted to make for himself. She was the only thing he had for that long summer after high school. No uncertain looks and worried comments from her friends could change his mind. Where Orihime went, Ulquiorra-kun was always right behind her. It was never a question for him; it was just what he did.

And when she left her little apartment for university in August, he followed just the same.

She did not even think to protest.

* * *

"_Hello?"_

"_Inoue-san?"_

"_Ishida-kun! How are you? It's been so long!"_

"… _it's only been a few days, Inoue-san."_

"_Really? Wow, I didn't realize! Heehee, all these pop quizzes must be getting to my head!"_

"_Don't worry about it. How are you liking college?"_

"_Oh, it's great! I really wish you could have come here with Tatsuki-chan and me, it'd be so much more fun with you around! … Ishida-kun?"_

"_Oh__, um, nothing. Thank you, that's very kind. … Actually, Inoue-san, I was calling to ask you … is … there hasn't been any trouble with him, has there? I mean, I know I checked when I called you last, but with him, well …"_

"_With wh—oh! No, no, of course not! He's been … great, Ishida-kun. As good as he can be. He still seems a little out of place, but he's trying his best, I can tell. And I spend a lot of time around him, so I could tell if he was having any issues getting settled in."_

"_Well, that's not exactly what I meant, but … good. I'm glad you're doing okay."_

"_Me? Why would there be a problem with me?"_

"… _don't worry about it, Inoue-san. So, um … did you get the chance to finish that knitting project you started?"_

"_Oh, yeah! I'll have to show it to you when you come visit, or maybe I can visit you one weekend! It turned out really pretty, and I felt like the design could use some flowers, so I added some, and—"_

* * *

If people asked—the girls in her dorm, mostly, the first time they saw them walking to class together with fingers clasped—she told them that he asked her out a few weeks after her first semester began.

Only when Tatsuki-chan asked had she told the truth, and Kurosaki-kun, Ishida-kun, Sado-kun and even Kuchiki-san and Renji-kun, had figured it out for themselves.

He had never "asked her out," not in any way that most people would recognize. As much as he had done to integrate into human society, such a concept was still as foreign as the romantic comedies she showed him on their frequent movie nights could let it be. He never called her his girlfriend, or took her on anything he called a date. One day, he simply realized that she was willing to stay with him forever, or at least as long as human life allowed before she passed on. It was around then she realized in turn that he had been intent on keeping her by his side for far longer, though the circumstances had changed from locking her up in a cell to sending hard stares the way of any suspicious male who got within three meters of her person.

Since she didn't know when or how it had happened, she never had the chance to assess her own feelings on the matter. Sometimes, even months afterward, she didn't know what he was to her, since no label she tried seemed to fit him quite right.

The box in her heart that Kurosaki-kun had long filled had emptied, bit by bit, until he had shifted to a new box altogether. Always special to her, always someone she would look at differently than anyone else. Just not the same as before. But no matter how she tried, Ulquiorra-kun could not fit in the empty box. That wasn't what he did. He didn't fill the empty spaces. He made his own, even if it meant digging it out by tooth and nail. And one day, she looked in the mirror and saw it there, as if it had grown overnight, and he had settled himself in without giving her notice or choice.

It was the furthest thing from what she had pictured. But she decided, sometimes, that that was almost better. She had pictured an ordinary life for herself—well, she would have added in owning her own cake shop and adopting far too many stray animals, but in its essence, her ideas had been plain. Fall in love. Be asked out. Date for a while, hold hands, kiss, get married, then settle down with a few kids and live a quiet, happy life into old age.

But she couldn't fit Ulquiorra-kun into that stream of expectations. He knew little of such human traditions, and even for what little he knew, he didn't care. He did things the way he saw fit, for his own reasons, on his own schedule. There was no following the preset pattern. Everything to come was a mystery. Everything was new.

She might have been able to stand for ordinary, after all the insanity of the past few years. But she found, quickly enough, that nothing could rival the thrill of the unexpected.

* * *

"_Is he stalking you?"_

"_Huh? What? … oh! No, of course not!"_

"_Then what do you call him standing around waiting for you everywhere? I swear, I didn't think I'd get to have a moment alone with you ever again, Orihime, and we go to the same school! Even right now! Look! He's still out there on that bench!"_

"_He's just reading …"_

"_And he looks up at you every thirty seconds. I counted while you were getting our drinks. It's creepy."_

"_Oh, Ulquiorra-kun's just … well, he doesn't have much else to do …"_

"_I get that. I mean, he's still … new to being here and all. But he could at least go back to his apartment. Did he get kicked out or something for being so scary?"_

"_He's not scary!"_

"_He's got white skin, tear-shaped tattoos on his face, black fingernails, a black upper-lip—I still don't believe that isn't goth lipstick—and I'm starting to wonder if he even knows how to smile. Not to mention the fact that he looks at everyone around him like they're either ants he's about to squash or little green aliens with four fingers and antennae."_

"_He doesn't look at me like that, Tatsuki-chan."_

"_Yeah, just everyone else. I can't figure out how he looks at you, but it's definitely not how most guys look at their girlfriends. Will he still not call you that?"_

"_He doesn't call me anything, really."_

"'_Woman.' He calls you that. Seriously, that's downright weird, he won't even say your name! Orihime, I'm your best friend and you know I respect your choice, but this guy … if he's not right for you and you just won't tell him 'cause you think he'll hurt you …"_

"_No! No, no, no, of course not, Tatsuki-chan! Ulquiorra-kun is … he's hard to explain."_

"_Yeah. Tell me about it."_

"_Are you gonna finish that drink?"_

"_No, you can have the rest."_

"_Yay! I'll go get the hot sauce!"_

"… _what?"_

* * *

He didn't take classes at the college, as he had no high school record to apply with, and Urahara-san had yet to be able to fake enough of a history for him to be admitted—and Ulquiorra-kun had shown no interest anyway, though he spent almost all his free time in the library. But despite those outings, without fail, he was always there outside her dormitory when she left for class in the morning, and he was always there outside of each classroom to meet her.

Most of the time, he didn't speak. He looked up, closed the book he had in his lap, took her hand, and walked with her to her next class, or lunch, or back to her dorm, so she had someone to ramble at while she did her homework.

The girls in her dorm thought it was the most romantic, thoughtful thing they had ever seen. Orihime saw no reason to deny it.

She had seen other couples hold hands, and to everyone else, she was sure this looked the same. But it never was. When she watched the other couples take each other's hand, it was with a flirtatious glance, or a cutesy smile, or showing off their new catch to their friends. Ulquiorra-kun never gave her flirtatious glances or cutesy smiles. Sometimes he grasped her fingers so lightly that the touch almost tickled, and sometimes he clutched her entire hand in his so that when he let go, she looked for a bruise. It was never meant as a traditional romantic gesture, and though Tatsuki-chan had quite nearly kicked him in the stomach the one time it _did _leave a bruise—early on, before he was used to controlling his strength in the gigai and when he had almost no experience with nonviolent physical contact—it was never meant to harm. He touched her fingers, clung to her hand, as if the thought of letting go meant she would never return. As if he had seen a heart between them and held it like a kitten pawing at a beam of light, which he knew deep down he could not keep in his grasp, but that didn't stop him from trying.

He always kept his other hand in his pocket. Stuffed away, guarded from the world he did not trust. But one hand lay bare and open and vulnerable, grasping her own with desperation his face never showed, and when she finally managed to slip away when she arrived at her class, he stuffed that hand in his other pocket so fast she almost thought it had never been out at all.

She hoped that one day, he would be brave enough to reach out for someone else, to have enough faith that he would not be shoved away to put out a second hand.

For now, though, even as her fingers went numb or she had to jog to keep up with his faster pace while they walked, she would hold the first, and as long as he held on, she would not let go.

* * *

"_This is Sado Yasutora. Please leave a message."_

"_Hm … hi, Sado-kun! Long time no see! Well, talk, I guess … How have you been? I hardly get to hear from you nowadays but I guess you never liked to talk much even when we hung out, so it makes sense that you wouldn't talk much on the phone! Anyway, I hope you're doing okay. I'm doing great! College is fantastic so far! I love all my classes and my roommate's really nice! She's from America but she speaks Japanese really well, but this means I can practice my English! Oh, and I'm taking—"_

"_Hello?"_

"_Sado-kun? Hi! I was just leaving a message!"_

"_Yeah. I saw."_

"_Glad you picked up! I was just talking about all the stuff that's going on so far, but I guess now that you're here I can ask you first!"_

"_That's fine. You can go ahead."_

"_Really? Okay! Anyway, my roommate's from America and we switch around between speaking Japanese and English so we can both practice, and we have an art class together, too! And I'm taking history and math and photography—I never thought I'd like photography, but it's really fun—oh, and biology. That's pretty interesting, too! And Ulquiorra-kun seems to find it fascinating, since he's always snatching my textbook up even when I'm trying to do my homework. It's okay, though, I usually just do other homework until he's done reading. He reads really fast!"_

"_So he's …"_

"_Oh, he's been really good! He has an apartment nearby but he spends most of his time over in my dorm or waiting for me after class. So we've gotten really close! And I know a lot of you guys were worried that he wouldn't be okay staying here closer to me instead of staying with Urahara-san, but it's really no problem. He doesn't have any issues staying in his gigai or keeping his reiatsu in check, and he never tries to hurt anyone, honest! Well, I guess there was that one time this guy started flirting with me and I didn't notice at first but when I did I tried to tell him I wasn't interested but he wouldn't give up, and Ulquiorra-kun was nearby and he walked up really fast and stared the guy right in the eyes and told him that if he didn't leave he'd tear out his tongue! The guy was really freaked out! I told Ulquiorra-kun that was mean and he didn't listen, but anyway I know he didn't mean it so there's no need to worry! He's fine and I'm fine, too! … So anyway, how have you been?"_

"_Good."_

"… _anything else?"_

* * *

Ulquiorra-kun wasn't cuddly.

She had almost called him that once, but she had already spent enough time around him to imagine the crease of his brow, the downward curve of his lips, and the faint scoff that would resonate in his throat, and she knew there was no point. She let herself go around him plenty, and though he sometimes protested, he never seemed to truly mind. For this—when it was about him—she could keep her thoughts to herself.

So she tried to find a word that would suit him better than that, but all of them sounded wrong, and after a while she decided that like with everything else, Ulquiorra-kun did things in his own way, and oftentimes there simply was no word to describe it.

He went about other forms of touching the same as he did hand-holding. He never did it because it was romantic, or expected, or even because she wanted it. He did it for his own reasons, some of which she still didn't understand. Sometimes she might have called it affectionate, though she knew he had no such intentions. Sometimes she might have called it forceful, even harsh, though he never meant to hurt her. It hovered between the two extremes, on his own plane far away from the norm. And it happened often enough that the world "cuddly" had popped into her head, but nonetheless, the word never really fit.

Holding her hand remained—and would always remain, she assumed—his most regular display. It was ordinary now, expected, so much that if he hadn't taken her hand one morning while walking her to class, she might have panicked. Actions other than that were random, sometimes several weeks apart, sometimes clustered into the same day. Sometimes he wrapped his arm around her waist and tugged her to his side if someone else came near while they walked together. First it had been with Kurosaki-kun when he visited her—and Kurosaki-kun had been quick to ask if he hurt her from holding her so tight—then with others, anyone Ulquiorra-kun deemed a threat in some way or another. When they rode on the bus, he usually sat so close that their sides pressed together, though she was never sure if it wasn't just him wanting to be as far from the other passengers as possible, since she typically slid onto their bench first and therefore left him the aisle seat.

Other times, far rarer than that, he would touch her more gently, though she never knew what prompted him. Once they had been in the library, and when she turned her head she found his face closer to hers, his thin fingers reaching out to brush her eyebrows, under her lips, around the frame of her face. Then he turned back to his book without a word and never offered explanation, and she was far too flustered to ask. Another day, he lifted strands of her hair while they sat watching a movie in her dorm room. He stroked fingers through it, pulled some away from her scalp to examine, even brought a lock close to his face and stared down at it as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world. He seemed to forget they even had a movie playing, and though she pretended to watch the rest, she spent the following hour focused only on his fingers in her hair.

She remained shy about initiating such things herself. Early on, she wasn't sure they would be welcome. She thought he might pull away from a hug, or jerk back if she laid her head on his shoulder and let her tumble to the ground. A part of her, she supposed, still saw him as the captor who refused to comfort her, who responded to her desperate concern over the thought of her friend's death by assuring her that the others would soon follow. She had seen his vulnerabilities deep within, ones he could not fully recognize himself, but on the outside he remained the statue. She took what he gave, what he did on his own. She didn't dare reach any further than that when she wasn't sure if he had anything else to give.

It took her a long time to see the black pit beneath his thick skin. A long time to understand the pain that only came out in nightmares, lurking behind the quiet sleep she so rarely got to see.

He wasn't one to show them. When she had a bad dream, she tossed and turned in her sleep and her roommate shook her awake in a panic, and though she laughed it off, it usually took her another hour to get back to sleep. She told him about them, sometimes, when he saw her the next morning and informed her that she looked awful. She hadn't taken it offensively, not for long. He had always been honest. In his own way, it was a gesture of concern, as if to say that she looked fine the rest of the time, so any day she did not must signify something gone wrong. He had yet to be wrong so far. He sat then, or walked with her hand in his to class, and listened in silence as she explained her dreams. She told him her nightmares of losing her brother, or when he became a Hollow. Her nightmares of when Tatsuki-chan was attacked, or of Soul Society before they were allies. Even when she dreamed of the day in the park, her time in Las Noches, the battle on the roof, she did not lie. He wouldn't let her. So she told him of those, too, some where he was the villain and some the victim, but most of the time somewhere in the blurred gray in between.

It was only him she could tell about the nightmares where Kurosaki-kun had not been stopped, and he had killed Ulquiorra-kun, then Ishida-kun, then turned to fire a Cero at her.

For months, she had no idea that he had dreams like her. Good dreams and bad dreams. He never brought it up. He hid it well, and remained hidden until December, just before finals week, when she had already finished her cramming and her roommate was away all night studying with a classmate for their history exam. She texted Ulquiorra-kun and they spent the evening watching movies he didn't understand, movies most boys would laugh at, but he tolerated for the simple fact that they were new and strange, and humans continued to present a mystery to him which he was still determined to solve.

Neither of them originally intended for Ulquiorra-kun to stay the night. Orihime had no exams the next day, so she just popped movie after movie into the TV, and by the time she looked at the clock, it was the early hours of the morning, and her eyes had begun to droop. Even through her veil of sleepiness, though, she could make out Ulquiorra-kun's sluggish movements, his frequent blinks, and the yawns he forced his gigai to suppress but never managed to hide from her. She offered him her roommate's bed for the night—Zoe-san had told her on the first day that she was free to invite friends overnight when she was gone—and by the time she came back from the bathroom, teeth brushed and day clothes replaced by pajamas, he had already pulled back the sheets and laid down. Strands of black hair fell in front of his half-lidded eyes, the blankets tugged to his shoulders, his face aimed toward the ceiling like a corpse laid out for display instead of an Arrancar in gigai half-asleep.

She shuddered at the comparison, and found herself grateful that he was too tired to notice and make her explain.

If she had been more awake, she might have wondered if it was too bold of her to ask him to stay. But her own sleepiness and the drowsiness of her temporary roommate threw those ideas from her head before she had time to register them, and she slipped under her familiar covers with only a word of goodnight to the occupant of the other bed. He gave no response. He rarely did. She closed her eyes in the dark of the night and listened to him breathe across the room, in and out, in and out. It sounded like the thumping of a heartbeat pressed against her ear, just as comforting, just as real, and she barely had time to marvel at the strangeness of it all before her thoughts faded to dreams.

She woke up to a hitch in the even, steady pattern breaths which had lulled her to sleep. Her eyes shot open, and seconds later, the sound registered in one ear and she turned toward her left. The light of the window near her only just reached the other bed, but as her eyes adjusted, she saw the sleeping form across from her in full view.

His face had changed. Not in ways most people would see, but she had spent hours over the past months watching him. She had memorized every centimeter of his face so that she could have drawn a perfect portrait from memory alone. So she could see the tension in his jaw, the tiny crease between his eyebrows, his lips just a bit tighter than normal. When she looked further down, she saw his hands clutching the edges of his sheets, squeezed into fists close to his chest. And in the dark of the room, she could make out his breaths: shallower, shakier, as if he would not allow himself to tremble on the outside, but it slipped through without his consent.

Her chest ached, and when it all finally registered in her sleep-ridden mind, it felt like a sword had been jabbed through her heart and stopped it beating altogether.

She slipped her legs out from under the covers and padded the short distance across the floor to the other bed. She stopped just a step away as the realization of what she was doing only then crossed her mind. Of who he had been, of all that had happened between them, of what his old self would have said at her thoughts, and what his new self might still say now.

But then he breathed out, and she heard what might have been a whimpering sigh in anyone else, his brow creased more than he allowed when he was awake, his thin fingers clenching the white sheets so hard they almost melded together.

Orihime clenched her teeth, lifted the blankets, and slid onto the bed beside him. Before she could think, she laid her peachy fingers over his pale hand and clasped it within her own.

His movements while awake were usually slow, or subtle, or so routine that she barely noticed them anymore, but now the touch of her hand acted like cold water over his head. His breath caught in his throat, his face frozen, and for a second, she thought his eyes might snap open. But seconds later, he breathed out, slow and heavy. His fingers unclenched from the sheet and grasped hers in return, gentle at first, then tight, as if they were hanging over the edge of a cliff and she would fall if he so much as loosened his grip.

Then he turned on his side and slid toward the cold side of the pillow, toward her, bit by bit, her hand still grasped in his own.

She had always been shy about such things, especially with him, someone who didn't know how things were "supposed" to go. But now her shyness faded, and without a second's hesitation she wrapped her other arm around his back and tugged his thin, bony form toward her. He did not resist. As he grew closer, he began to breathe again, slower and steadier, the shakiness subsiding. He moved the last few centimeters on his own until his head rested just below her neck, hands clasped, the opposite arms tucked in between their stomachs.

Up close, for the first time, she could feel the center of his chest against her abdomen. She could feel the thudding beneath the skin and bone, the pumping organ, the physical form of the idea which had eluded him even before they met. She felt the pace of it slow, calmer and calmer to match her own. And as it did, she felt him slide down until his ear was pressed to the center of her chest, right above the matching organ within herself, _thump thump _against his head. He took one deep, long breath, then let it out slow and heavy. The last of the tension in his face vanished in a second, visible even in the pale moonlight from the window, shadowed by her own form against him.

She looked down on him with the same wonder as when he had fallen asleep on her couch in Las Noches. When she had looked over from her finished meal and seen the stoic Arrancar stretched out on the cushions, arms folded over his stomach, body straight and even, chest lifting up and down with each slow breath. Back then it had felt like hitting her funny bone, and she was torn between finding him precious and remembering all that he had done. But the latter faded away until all she saw was a person. Perhaps a young man when he had died, pained and alone as he became a Hollow and suffered through the years that passed. Dressed in a shell of stone, but not one that could avoid tiny glimpses to what he remained deep down. Now, years later, she had to dig through her mind to even recall that he had once been her enemy. That he had kidnapped her, threatened her, killed the boy most precious to her twice over. Now he was shattered and lost in a new world he could not understand, and she was the only one here to care for him.

His nightmare did not return, and she fell back asleep half an hour later by the clock on the nightstand, the moonlight like a blanket stretched over them both. By the time she opened her eyes the next morning, he was already awake, clothes straightened as if he hadn't slept at all, face impassive and unexposed, and they spent a quiet Sunday cooking in the empty dorm kitchen.

She never asked him about that night. He had never told her about his past, likely because he still deemed it useless to go back to when he could not change it now. She doubted it had been any happier than she imagined.

But from then on, she showed no reserve in hugging him, or pulling him to rest his head on her shoulder or on her lap while they watched a movie, and she found, contrary to her prior thoughts, he did not protest. Not when she wrapped her arms around him like she would comfort a child, not when she ran her fingers through his hair from the top of his scalp to his neck, not when she jumped up and threw her arms around his neck in a sudden embrace just before she stepped into class. She no longer cared if anyone saw, and even with each new display of affection she tried, she did not fear him pushing her away.

He never did.

* * *

"_Thanks, Ulquiorra-kun! I'll wait to start the movie until you get back!"_

"_Wow … I was starting to think he wouldn't go."_

"_Of course he did! He usually brings me snacks from the vending machine when I'm doing my homework, since he doesn't have any. Well, actually, he usually makes the snacks himself. He says nothing from the vending machine has 'nutritional value.'"_

"_He can cook?"_

"_Oh yeah! He's really good at it! I mean, I think the food would be better with more spices, maybe some wasabi, oh, and honey! And soy sauce! But other than that, it's really good."_

"_He's … different than I expected."_

"_You two should get to know each other more. Maybe you can have lunch together sometime! You know, without me. It seems like you both just talk to me more when we're all here."_

"_Inoue … I … think he's only here because you're here. I don't think he has much interest in talking to anyone else."_

"_Really, Kuchiki-san? You think so?"_

"_You're … I know I'm in Soul Society a lot of the time, and even when I'm in this world I'm not usually _here_, but I've talked to Ichigo and everyone else. None of them ever talk to him. Ichigo tried a few times early on, he really wanted to talk on good terms if not be friends, apparently, but … Ulquiorra never talked back. Ishida still has some old issues with him, but he tried, too. Even Sado said he did once or twice, when Ulquiorra first came here. But he's not interested in anyone but you."_

"_You … wouldn't like to get to know him sometime, then?"_

"_It's not that, Inoue. He gets along well enough with the rest of us. But we're … the extras. You're the important one. None of us mind if he doesn't like us, though … I just wish he'd be kinder toward you. You're so caring toward him. You deserve to get the same thing in return."_

"_I guess … he's a little like Byakuya-san."_

"_Nii-sama?"_

"_Yeah. I mean, Byakuya-san doesn't talk to people a lot, from what you've said, not unless he has to. But he cares about you. I know it's different because you're his sister and Ulquiorra and me, we're … well. He may not act like it all the time, but he does care. You know your brother cares about you, right, even if he doesn't actually show it?"_

"… _yes. I suppose I do."_

"_People … I think it's not as easy for everyone to show it. Like for Byakuya-san. And Ulquiorra-kun. But … they're good people. Deep down."_

"_Inoue … what exactly do you feel for h—"_

"_Oh! Ulquiorra-kun! That was quick! C'mon, bring the snacks, we can all share! I'll get the movie started!"_

* * *

Kissing was her thing, not his.

That was fine, though. It had never been something she particularly imagined him doing, even when the reality of the relationship had first set in.

It was a loss, in a way. Ever since Onii-chan read her fairy tales when she was little, she had dreamed of her first kiss. She dreamed of it under the stars, at the end of a perfect date, with a prince. Then she imagined it with Kurosaki-kun, and it hadn't mattered as much whether it was under the stars or with him unconscious, her clutching his hand and leaning over to give him one kiss before she left.

The wars had changed her, as wars would undoubtedly do. She still dreamed, and if Ulquiorra-kun was any judge, she dreamed of silly things, impossible things. Onii-chan had always told her to dream of impossible things, because if you didn't, you would never find out how possible they were. But she also realized some things that mattered more than others. Her world changed from planning her budget for the next month to fearing for the deaths of her entire town. She had seen worlds she had never dreamed of, she had seen angels and monsters, had seen angels become monsters and monsters become angels. And after all she had seen, the fact that she had someone by her side now, regardless of whether he fit her long-held idea, was enough for her.

Early on, though, she still had her expectations. She still had her old dreams. And if he would not be the one to bring them to life—and she had waited a very long time for him to do so—she would act herself.

So on a whim one night when he dropped her off from one of their restaurant dinners he had yet to call a date, she leaned up and pressed a light kiss to his cheek, then flushed and scurried off so fast she couldn't make out his face. It wasn't until the next day during their walk to class that he asked her what she had done, and she realized that he really didn't knew.

He had heard of the concept and witnessed it before, albeit rarely. But he seemed to view it like he might view the elaborate dances bees did to communicate to other members of their hive: fascinating, but the domain of another species, not one he had ever intended on using himself. It had admittedly been a bit of relief to hear that his failure to kiss her didn't mean he didn't feel for her. Even with that knowledge, though, she could not let it go quite that easily. It was that one thing, perhaps, that she hung onto the longest.

She kissed him again a few days after that, once more on the cheek. This time she looked to him for a response, her smile more desperate than she would have liked, but he just stared down at her with the same eyes as before. She explained the significance, but it made no difference to him.

It was weeks later before she dared to grab his shoulders, stand on her toes, and kiss him on the lips.

She expected fireworks, perhaps. A thrill. And indeed, her heart raced so hard in her chest it ached, she trembled for minutes on end, and she imagined her face stayed red for at least an hour afterward. But the feel of it was different. Since she had closed her eyes just before she moved, she landed a bit off, so she kissed half his mouth and half his cheek. He did not move, did not shift so their lips touched in full, and it felt a bit like kissing a warm, soft wall. She stayed there for three, five, ten, fifteen seconds in all, but no matter how she hoped, he did not respond. And when she pulled away, his blank stare had not changed.

She tried to call it her first kiss later, but the term did not seem to fit.

The thought hit her like a rock to the head, and she couldn't bring herself to speak to him at all the next day. He held her hand just the same.

But she found that, days later and for some time after, he made attempts. He approached it like putting on a large feathered hat and dancing the tango in high heels, awkward and unsure, but he tried just the same. And that was more than she had dared to hope.

When he kissed her, she initially had to fight the urge to laugh at his helplessness. He mimicked what she had done, and what he had seen in movies, but he never could seem to get it right. First he simply pressed his mouth against her cheek or her forehead, and it felt more like his lips had happened to brush against her face than a kiss. When she tried—with as little awkwardness as one could approach such a subject, particularly to someone who viewed the whole thing with analytical distance—to explain a proper kiss, he had gone to the other extreme, and when he first kissed her cheek after that, it was with overly puckered lips, enough pressure to make her lean to the side, and far too much noise, sounding like he was trying to get a crumb out of the straw in a cookies and cream milkshake, or perhaps a three-year-old kissing the glass of a fish tank. He had also chosen to do it right outside her math class with all the other students present, with no warning when she walked out the classroom door, as if he had spent the entire hour sitting outside and deciding on a proper technique. Her face was red for the rest of the day, and she never could get him to understand why.

Sometimes she suspected he got it wrong on purpose, to dissuade her from what he viewed as a pointless action, as she had personally shown him several times what a kiss was meant to be like—the awkwardness wore off rather quickly with the amount of explanations he required—and he was usually excellent at mimicking human behaviors. They had once caught glimpse of a particularly carefree couple kissing near a school building, and he had commented well in earshot that they looked like they were trying to eat one another's faces off. Only by the sheerest force of will had she managed to clear some distance before she broke out in giggles.

He still tried from time to time, perhaps for his own sake, perhaps because she had once been so intent on it. But each time it felt less like an expression of emotion and more like a random experiment, a spot test to see if he had improved. He watched her face, and whatever he was waiting to see did not appear. And while she searched his face in return, he always looked like he had the time she had taken him to the shoe store, and he spent a full ten minutes making comments on the impracticality of almost every pair of women's shoes on the shelves.

She had spent most of her life dreaming of a romantic kiss. But he had no such dreams, and that was yet another thing she would not be able to change.

It took her a long time after that to accept it, but once she did, it flowed, in its own strange way, like everything else had so far.

She kissed him at least a few times a week after that, on the cheek, on the forehead, and sometimes on the lips, though he never seemed to know how to respond to the third and usually just stood there. At first it felt like kissing a statue, and as uncomfortable as that comparison implied, but after a while she noticed that his hand would rest against her waist to keep her steady, or hold her around the small of her back. More often, though, she felt his fingers reach forward and thread through hers, their knuckles brushed together, the hold gentle and slight but all too intentional.

She had her ways of expressing a bond, and he had his.

They had never been entirely on the same wavelength, and that was alright. That was just fine. As long as they were flowing in the same direction.

* * *

"_Yo, Inoue."_

"_K-Kurosaki-kun?! What are you doing here? I thought you were in Soul Society this weekend! It's so good to see you!"_

"_Good to see you, too. I was hoping I'd catch you here. It's been a while, hasn't it?"_

"_Mm-hmm!"_

"_So … Ulquiorra's not with you today?"_

"_No, he's at the grocery store. I have class and we're all out of food for dinner, and this is the first time he's gone on his own so I hope it goes okay! He gets really confused by the labels sometimes, and he never knows what brands to get! But he's gone with me a lot already, so I think he'll do fine. Anyway, I'm walking back to my dorm now, want to walk with me?"_

"_Sure. … You're doing okay, then?"_

"_Yep!"_

"_It's just … well, Tatsuki and I talk when we can, and … she's still a little iffy about Ulquiorra. Whether it's really okay for him to be with you and everything. You did tell her the truth about him, right?"_

"_Yeah … last summer, actually. I didn't want to lie to Tatsuki-chan anymore. She took it pretty badly at first, almost broke his nose actually, but … it worked out. I had to stand between them a few times to stop her, though."_

"_Yeah, that's Tatsuki."_

"_What … you just said what Tatsuki-chan thinks, but … what you think, Kurosaki-kun? Are you still … concerned about all this?"_

"_Well … I'd be lying if I said I didn't worry. I mean, he's … he kind of did a lot. Didn't realize for a while that that was him who cut off Ishida's hand, always thought that was … well. Me. And he kidnapped you, and I bet he never apologized for it."_

"_Ulquiorra-kun … isn't really that type."_

"_No … no, he's not. Ulquiorra's got a lot of stuff he'll have to deal with eventually. I always did get the feeling that guy was hiding things, even from himself. I mean, I tried to treat him like one of us early on, and he just ignored me, mostly. But … he's been with you for all this time already, and you're a pretty good judge of character. If he was gonna turn against us, I think you would have noticed something by now. You know him better than any of us … sometimes I think you probably know him better than he knows himself. And I … I owe him, after all. For what he did. Stopping me, back then. He deserves another chance. And if you're still this happy, I guess he must be doing something right. You are happy … with him? Aren't you, Inoue?"_

"_I'm happy, Kurosaki-kun. I'm very happy."_

"_Good."_

* * *

He insisted, through it all, that he was not human.

That, above anything else, was something she knew he would never grow out of.

He wasn't human, and she knew it. He would never truly be human. As soon as he stepped out of his gigai—as rare as that was nowadays—and unzipped his collar, she could see the gaping hole in the center of his chest. It would always be there, just like the mask on his head. It would be there until he decided he wanted to be purified, and as he had apparently spoken to Urahara-san long ago about getting passage to Soul Society after she died, she doubted that was happening anytime soon. Underneath the false flesh, he would always be a Hollow, an Arrancar, no matter how much he looked otherwise, no matter how much he had melded into their world.

Her world.

He insisted it at the strangest times, or what would seem like strange times to anyone who didn't know him well. When she took his hand rather than him taking hers, he insisted he wasn't human. When she told him how thin he looked and tried to give him an enormous bowl of pasta with more cheese than noodles for dinner, he insisted he wasn't human. And on the nights when her roommate was out of town and he slipped into bed next to her, no longer bothering with the pretense of separate beds first, and she held him against her, their bodies warm even through their pajamas, he insisted he was not human. She never gave a response. She knew he didn't expect one. She knew as well as he did that the words made no difference to her, that they were the last thin wall he held between him and the rest of the world, one that she might never be able to knock down, but which she could slip through almost as easily as Hacchi-san's barriers.

Indeed, she could still see the Arrancar even through the facade of his gigai. Sometimes when she looked at him in front of the bright sun, she thought she could see the shape of his mask over his head, or his clothes melding into the black-rimmed white uniform she couldn't forget if she tried. When his grip on her hand tightened so much she almost felt it go numb, she remembered he was stronger than anyone of her kind should be. When he stared down at her with hard, blank eyes, she could see him standing in the doorway of her cell in Las Noches, hands in pockets, impassive as he gave her orders like a machine. His knowledge of war and martial arts exceeded even Tatsuki-chan's, he walked with his back unnaturally straight, and the tear marks which burned into his face spoke of far more years of experience than anyone of her species would get the chance to see.

But on the nights when he laid down next to her, her fingers stroking his hair until he fell asleep, he always placed his head on the center of her chest. He closed his eyes and listened, his face blank as ever, his body neat and straightened rather than curled up. But he felt like a child in her arms, a boy who never known care or love, a boy who found a strange, unexplainable comfort in the beating of another's heart, in the knowledge that there was a living being beside him. One who would not leave him, would not reject him, would never turn her back and betray him.

He had reached out for it from the beginning, in one way or another, like that same lost child who did not know what he wanted and did not know how to find or understand it. He shunned the world in fear, cut out all happiness to forsake the pain. Then he followed the orders of a single leader without question, with hardly a thought for himself, always leaning back on that leader as an excuse to not do what he meant, to not admit that he did what he did for his own reasons as well.

She laid there some nights, awake even after he had fallen asleep, and imagined him alive. Imagined him alone and afraid, imagined him dying with no one there to comfort him, imagined him wandering lost and aching until the hollowness took over and he lost what had made him hurt in the first place. Then she imagined Onii-chan, watching over her for three years, watching as she tried to move on with her life and growing more and more alone. Onii-chan, who had always been strong and determined, Onii-chan who could never hurt her, Onii-chan who she had loved more than anyone in the world. Onii-chan who had still been human beneath the mask, beneath the gaping hole in his chest, even as the monster fought to control him.

Onii-chan … whose eyes had smiled as he faded into nothing, as if the only thing he had ever needed was the love of his dear little sister.

Like the Arrancar, exhausted and vanishing more each second, had stared back at her and lifted his arm in hope for something he did not believe he could have, but which he dared to reach for one last time.

Ulquiorra-kun wasn't human.

But the human inside him gripped her hand every day, reached out to examine her hair, kissed her cheek far too noisily, and drew quiet, peaceful breaths as his head rested against her heart.

And she would never let that human be alone again.

* * *

On the first day the cherry blossoms were in bloom, she picked a bench outside near the dorm and plopped herself down, both their bento boxes under her arm, and he took his place beside her while she doled out their meals.

She had cooked the food—with his insistent "supervision" so he could tell her what to leave out in his portion—while he had prepared the celebratory spring sweets. Even though he insisted such things had no nutritional value and there was no point in their consumption, he had shown himself exceptionally gifted in treat-making, and she suspected he secretly enjoyed them. She wondered if they tasted anything like souls. She wondered then if he had any memory of eating souls long ago, or if he had ever done so as an Arrancar. Somehow she found it far harder to imagine with him than others of his kind, and she wasn't sure if she would have found it so difficult when she met him years ago.

They ate their meals in relative silence, Ulquiorra-kun holding to his tendency to only speak when necessary. She could not bring herself to mind. They watched the pink blossoms on the trees in the distance float down with each gust of wind, watched some of them fall on the heads and shoulders of other students sitting at nearby picnic tables, watched the signs of life and beginnings flutter around them as spring yawned and stretched its arms and winter settled in to sleep.

When the empty boxes had been closed and set to the side, Orihime handed Ulquiorra-kun his cookie and took her own in both hands, the pink of the dessert almost matching the color of her fingers in the chilled air. He did not eat his, but slipped it into the pocket of his jacket for later, as he often did. She held back a giggle, shook her head, and placed half of the cookie past her lips in anticipated delight.

"I love you."

She bit down so hard her teeth clacked, crumbs dropping to her lap while she nearly choked on what remained in her mouth. She swallowed and breathed by sheer force of will and jerked her head to find him staring back at her, eyes impassive and blank, the same as any day, as if he had just told her it might rain tomorrow.

"… wh … what?"

His brow lowered so slightly she almost missed it.

"You heard me, woman," he repeated in words sharp as a blade. "I love you."

She sputtered, mouth opening and closing every few seconds while she tried and failed to speak. "You … uh … I …"

He waited several seconds after her silence. "You have no response?"

"I …"

She tried to speak again. But her tongue couldn't seem to remember how to form words, couldn't make the occasional blubbering sounds that tumbled from her lips into anything meaningful. Her heart beat as hard as it had that night almost a year before, sitting in her apartment with the reformed body under her shield, so fast she thought it might jump and choke her. He stared back for half a minute more, his face unchanging, waiting, patient in that way only he was. At last she pressed her lips together, helpless, her face so heated and her body so shaky she thought she might fall off the bench.

Ulquiorra-kun turned to face the open area in front of them, like a giant courtyard in the midst of brick buildings. The yellow grass had begun to turn green again, despite the residual chill. He wore the same pale jacket he had worn months upon months ago at the library last summer, and now he had wrapped pale green scarf around his neck. Bundled up against the chill, even his white cheeks a bit pink from the bite—not from embarrassment, never for him—she had never seen him look more alive.

His shoulders sagged, his brow lifted, his eyes focused away from her, contemplative and distant. The straightness of his spine curved, one hand behind him and one folded over his lap, like when he had pushed himself to sit up on her couch years ago after the nap he had never intended to take.

"You tried to explain to me once. Perhaps you did not succeed," he suggested, and somehow he made it seem as if he was equally irritated with them both. He breathed out through his nose. It wasn't a sigh, because Ulquiorra-kun didn't sigh. His eyes lowered toward his lap. "But there seems to be no stronger word in your language to express emotions toward someone else. I admit, though, your language is vastly limited. The definition you gave of that word doesn't come close. And I do not like to use such human terms for myself. Yet it seems there is no better way that you would understand."

He breathed again, louder than she had ever heard. Then his voice faded to silence, as if he wanted to speak but could find nothing else to say.

She might have seen anxiety somewhere in his eyes, uncertainty, confusion, like he had only just now realized how he had thrown himself out there and now he almost regretted it. But this was Ulquiorra-kun. Those feelings might have been there, but she could never see them like she could see them in others. With him, it was always deeper, always more complex. He waited for her answer with more patience than any person she had met in her life, the breeze brushing around them, cold and warm all at once.

It felt like shattering a wall of glass when her lips curved, her brow tilted up toward the center, and she leaned forward just enough to draw his gaze back to her.

"Do you know where my heart is, Ulquiorra-kun?"

He blinked. His brow creased again.

"Woman, we spoke of this long ago," he reminded her. His eyes lowered to the wood of the bench underneath them, and the crease vanished and reappeared as deep as she had seen it in the dark during the nightmare of which they never spoke. His voice lowered as well, more to himself than to her. "I … understood. The heart is—"

"No." He snapped his head up, and she smiled, shaking her head back and forth in steady rhythm. She touched her fingers to her sternum through the pink fabric of her jacket. "I mean where _my _heart is."

Ulquiorra-kun's brows remained furrowed while he met her gaze. She wondered if he even noticed anymore. He parted his lips, then closed them. He shook his head, the movement slight and slow.

"You so rarely make sense," he murmured, an old complaint which no longer held any bite. He closed his eyes, breathed, and opened them anew. "Very well. Where is your heart?"

Orihime smiled, her lips pressed together, and she wanted to laugh and cry until her eyes dried up and her throat went hoarse.

She reached over and grasped one of his hands settled near his bento box on his lap. His white skin felt chilled under her own, but she held it just the same. She clasped it between both her palms and squeezed it until she felt the warm blood and pulse beneath their skin, and she could no longer tell where her hands ended and his began.

She looked up at him, but his eyes had already lowered, widened, brow curved like she had only seen it a handful of times before. Nonetheless, she did not turn away from his face, holding his hand with her own, clutching it like she might have held him had she found him as a wandering Plus so long ago, pained and alone, with no one to show they cared. She gave it one final squeeze.

"It's right here."

He stared down at their hands like he might stare at a precious gemstone, or a fallen star. But Ulquiorra-kun did not care about gemstones or stars. He looked at the hands clasped around his own like she had never seen his eyes before, save perhaps for a moment, a split second through her building tears, when she stood on the rooftop and reached back toward his tired fingers. His brow lifted, his eyelids lowered just a bit, the line of his mouth soft. He took his other hand and lifted her hands up, his fingers as gentle as she had ever felt.

Then he leaned down and pressed his lips to the back of her hand. His lips puckered too much, and it was so noisy she was sure the other students at the nearby tables heard them and stared, but she did not turn to check. It was a long time before he lifted his head again, but even as he did, he did not let her hands fall. He clasped them within his own fingers, his eyes as soft as before, his touch as careful, like their hands might burst into ash if he pressed too hard, and he would be left alone on the bench under the quiet sun.

She tried, as if on a final whim from the leftovers of old, long-held feelings lingering in the back of her head, to imagine Kurosaki-kun sitting next to her, her hands wrapped around his as he lifted them up for a kiss. She tried to imagine his eyes as disbelieving, as wondrous, such a slight change from the ordinary but one she had long yearned to see. She tried to imagine him looking down at those hands like they were the only thing in the world that mattered, as if all he had seen in his life was darkness, and she was the light rising over the horizon, blinding and impossible and all too real.

She could not.

She had seen more looks on Kurosaki-kun than she had seen on almost anyone else, even when he had tried to hide it. Far more expression and overt feeling than she would ever see in Ulquiorra-kun. She saw frowns and scowls and gapes and the rare laugh. She saw smiles, and sometimes, now and then, they were real. She had seen the meaning in his eyes, the endless will, the determination and strength. She had seen the desperation, as much as he covered it up. But she would never see that same look as she saw now. Because Kurosaki-kun had not lived on a blank canvas for decades, perhaps centuries, and she was far from the only person to paint on it. She was a streak of pink and orange in a rainbow circled around a clouded, blackened sun. She could add color, but she could not chase away the clouds. She could not be the moon that rose on the horizon.

If she had been the rain, she had once thought, perhaps she might have reached him. Perhaps she might have found a way to understand him in the ways she had never been able to, to let him see her as she really was. But while she reveled in the rain, danced in it, felt the earth and the sky connect even though they would never truly mingle, the rain was his tears. The rain was the ache of all his past pains, the ones he would so rarely speak of, the rain that flooded and drowned and overwhelmed.

He needed someone to stop the rain, but all she could bring was the sun.

But Ulquiorra-kun did not mind the rain. She walked outside on pouring mornings and found him with a green umbrella, standing near the door, and when he reached out from underneath to grab her hand and pull her hand, he did not seem to notice the water dripping from his skin. For him, she could bring the rain on a sunny day, so he could see the light which had forever evaded him, and the rain could draw them together, the earth and the sky. But she could be better than the rain. She could reach what could not be reached, take his hand in a touch that he had once thought impossible. She could enter onto a blank canvas and paint a single streak, and that streak of color would light up the emptiness as a new sun.

Ulquiorra-kun needed her.

For him, she was essential. Necessary. Far from a burden or help on the sidelines. She was all he had in a big strange world, and she had the chance to make him happy. For everything she had tried and failed before, she would not fail this. She would not fail him.

She would show him the warmth of the sun.

"And the heart remains," she whispered at long last, like the early spring breeze which swirled around them, a murmur in the wind. "No matter what. Even if you can't see the one who holds it … it's always there. And it always will be."

He did not look up from their clasped hands. She felt the warmth, the pulse, the life within his fingers and palm, as clearly as she ever would. He breathed out, and if she had not known better, she would have thought it trembled, a murmur of feelings he would never let show.

"I see."

His mouth did not change after the words had passed his lips. It remained straight and even, as it always was. But when she heard the faint whisper of his voice, quiet enough so only she could hear, it was like a smile all by itself. Better than any smile she could have seen. His eyes turned up to meet hers, and when the corners of her mouth stretched and threatened to break the confines of her cheeks, those eyes smiled right back.

She squeezed his hand and pulled him up from the bench to walk back to her dorm, as if he was as human as herself, and for once, he felt no need to tell her he was not.


End file.
